ABSTRACT
Wang Hsin-ti came of 'bad' origins, an urban bourgeois family that had prospered in the bad old days of foreign and Kuomin tang rule. He had a book of poems published in Peking in 1935. He graduated from Tsinghua University in 1935. Wang Hsin-ti lived through the Japanese years in Shanghai which ended in 1945, the four-year interregnum under the restored Kuomintang government which ended in 1949, and for thirty-one years since then under Communist rule. Before the Japanese invaded north China, he went abroad to the University of Edinburgh to study English and English literature. The years brought the thoughts, including disenchantment with Chairman Mao Tun following upon the storms of the Cultural Revolution and the fall of the Gang of Four. Wang Hsin-ti helped organize and operate what became the National Foodstuffs Manufacturing Company, a food processing operation which served a large area with its output.
